86 EIGHT YFARS OLD Try cb) II . - L I .. valt" 1; I " o t e rocks" A truly noble brandy fro111 the Rhine 80 proof At all better liquor stores Foreign Vintages Inc · 30 Rockefeller Plaza, N. Y. Federal Wine and Liquor Co., Jersey City, N. }. THE PRISM AND THE DEVIL =:::' \ --:-'ig#- # \ '-' LA<\ZLO T HE Devil hasn't b en after me since the summer of 1925, when I was eleven years old, but the scrape I had with him then was close, and I still don't like to think about it. It began around the first of August, when the short, hot nights and searing days of northern Louisiana make the green cotton bolls burst and reveal their treas- ures of lint and seed. One morning, I went out to pick cotton. It was an easy way for a boy to earn a quarter; you just got a sack and started picking al- most anywhere, and the owner would payoff in cash-a cent a pound-at the general-merchandIse store. I rode my bicycle to the field that morning, and when I got there, I found Bot Winans and his wife already pick- ing. Bot was a colored man, a special friend of mine. I could discuss things with him that I wasn't able to talk about with a grown white man, and I think that, for his part, he was amused at such an unlearned human being, especially one who would drink down everything he said. He was an authority on many sub jects. It was about eight o'clock in the morning The air was fairly cool at that time of day, and the dew was on the cotton, which made it weigh more. You could pick cotton with dew on it but not with rain on it, because that much moisture made the cotton turn black when it was picked. Bot said he would race me to the end of the row, using only one hand against my two. He beat me easily. I picked on for about an hour after that, and then Rob Travers, a boy my own age, arrived on his bi- cycle. \V e had arranged the night before to go sWImmIng. I finished the row I was working on, and Rob and I got on our bicycles and went to the general- merchandise store to sell my cotton. It weighed fourteen pounds, and I col- lected a dime and four pennies. Rob had trIed to get me to put a brick in the sack so it would weigh more, but Mother had told me never to do that, and I didn't. On the way to the bayou where we were going to swim, we passed the schoolhouse. Rob pulled up and an- nounced that he was going to go in. I hesi tated. Mother had a long lIst of pro- hibitions, such as not going behind store counters and not touching little gIrls. (They're little flowers, Mother said, and you mustn't touch them.) She had never placed a specific prohibition on entering the schoolhouse during the summer, but it appeared obvious to me that she should have. Rob found an un- locked window and climbed in. He said he was going to look for a cap he had left there. This seemed a reasonable ex- cuse, so I followed him. Rob didn't find his cap. He hunted it for a while and then went into a rOOlTI that was used as a sort of general-science laboratory and began opening drawers. I said we should leave. About that time, he found a prism in one of the drawers. "Let's take it," he said. Now, if there was one thing that would bring perdition quicker than any- thing else, Mother said, it was taking something that didn't belong to you. I told Rob to leave the prIsm where It was, and I started back to the window He pretended to put the prism back, and then he ran ahead of me, climbed out of the window, and was riding away when I reached my bike. At the swimming place, Rob and I stripped. Before we dived in, Rob went to my bicycle, took my empty cotton sack, and upended it. Out fell the prism Rob threw it into the bayou and shout- ed, "You stole it after all! " "I didn't, either!" I said. "You brought it all the way down here in your cotton sack," Rob said. Here was a problem. The more I though t it over, the more guilty I felt. After all, I shouldn't have gone into the schoolhouse. Any of the heroes of the books I had been reading would have taken the prism away from Rob, thrashed him, and re- ported the incident to his starving mother at prayers that night. Thrashing Rob never occurred to me. I was too worried about the stolen prism. There was a log at one end of the bayou, and I dived from it several times and felt the bottom where I thought the prism might be, but I had no luck. T HAT nIght, Mother, Father, and I went to the Baptist Protracted Meeting. We were Methodists, but my father was in business, so we favored both churches. The preacher was a re- vivalist from over in Texas, and Father said he was a hell-fire-and-damnatÎon man. He was superb that night. The description he gave of Hell was the most vivid since Dante, Father said. The preacher said that sinners first go to Purgatory, a level place with a